Cameron Triplett: Agrees with columnist

December 16, 2010 10:39:00 AM

Uh oh! Either liberals are agreeing with me (my preference) or I''m agreeing with liberals! Or, as Al Gore put it, "Down is up, and up is down." In Wednesday''s op-ed piece by Philip K Howard he makes the argument for all laws having a "shelf life" or a built-in automatic "sunset clause" with no exceptions.

I have argued that same point for years, just not as well as he did. There are far too many well-intended laws with unintended consequences that need to be removed from the books or re-written, but our lawmakers are far too concerned with writing new laws to try to correct old, bad ones. And, when the courts decide just what the lawmakers meant (even when it is painfully obvious that they are 100% opposite of the intended meaning of a law), lawmakers often don''t go back and correct the oversight that allowed some judge to legislate from the bench.

We could probably wipe out half of the obsolete laws in America and be much better off.

I''ve also said for years that teachers that can''t teach should be looking for another job, whether they choose to or not, and those that do a good job ought to be rewarded for it. (When I was in college we had a saying that''s probably been around as long as there have been schools: Those who can, do; those who can''t, teach; those who can''t teach, teach teachers.) This is nigh impossible because of the Teachers'' Union. Now if liberals will just agree with me that labor unions are not automatically good for America we''ll get a little closer to seeing eye-to-eye.

Reader Comments

hope commented at 12/18/2010 7:48:00 AM:

It's an insult to the teachers to leave out the CEO's of the 9 largest banks that deal in over 70% of the finances of our country, that went on a gambling rampage with their customers money and lost, causing a total collapse of our economy. It appeared that they may have been carnival workers at one time and someone knocked their brains out, and the banks decided to hire them. But they did apologize saying we are sorry.